Most cities rely on marketing professionals, some on celebrities, but Baltimore could become the first destination to ask regular folks to sell the city.
To launch the Visit My Baltimore campaign, city tourism officials will set up a booth at the Inner Harbor where, just for today, people can record videos on what they love about living here. The videos - along with others that people can send in - will be posted online and, the thinking goes, spread around the world in the grass-roots fashion of YouTube and My Space.
The Baltimore Area Convention and Visitors Association hopes the down-home advertising approach gives the city a leg up in the fierce competition for tourists' dollars.
"It's a new way to market a destination, a new way to sell Baltimore," said Tom Noonan, BACVA president and chief executive officer. "Rather than it being a scripted, highly produced thing that the bureau is doing, we think it's more powerful to have it coming from independent people."
BACVA has been trying for months to coax people to make videos, and now it is intensifying the effort with the booth at McKeldin Square, magazine and bus shelter ads, a man walking around during events dressed as a giant camera, and prizes - including a chance to win $2,007.
The print ads and the ones that appear on 16 bus shelters around town feature a mirrored-looking surface and the slogan "The Camera Loves You."
BACVA has invested $300,000 in this campaign, a significant portion of the group's yearly marketing budget.
"It's going to be one of our biggest strategies this year," Noonan said.
At the McKeldin Square "video village," which will be open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. today, people will be able to watch sample videos, play Baltimore trivia games and then film a video in front of a Baltimore backdrop.
The top videos created on-site will win prizes, including a weekend stay in Baltimore, digital video cameras and attraction tickets. The best video completed before Sept. 4 will win $2,007.
In addition to filming live today, people can create videos and upload them onto VisitMyBalti more.com or send them to BACVA.
Margot Amelia, BACVA's former vice president of marketing who is now executive director of Maryland's tourism office, came up with the idea of using everyday people as marketers.
One in three leisure travelers depend on other travelers' reviews, and tourists are turning to Web sites such as tripadvisor.com more than such traditional vacation guides as Frommer's and Fodor's.
"People want their peers' comments," Amelia said. "I won't book a trip unless I've gone to TripAdvisor and see what my peers think of the hotel I'm thinking of booking - it's a real seismic shift in how travel is being planned and thought about."
The District of Columbia's tourism site includes video endorsements from famous people, and New Orleans filmed tourists talking up the city. But BACVA officials believe they are the first in the country to experiment with the amateur-produced videos from city residents.
Douglas C. Frechtling, professor of tourism studies at George Washington University, said he thinks the technique could be useful in reaching younger, tech-savvy people who spend a lot of time online.
Though Europe and Asia are fairly advanced at Internet advertising, particularly the third-party endorsement style, in the United States, it hasn't gone much beyond toothpaste and cosmetics marketing, Frechtling said.
"I think it's worth trying. It's in the genre of Web 2.0 or Web 5.0 or wherever we are now when user content is starting to rule," he said. "People rank that as more believable in surveys I've seen. It's presumably done by people with no ax to grind, no money changing hands - just individuals reacting to the product."
That said, Frechtling wonders if Baltimore isn't essentially paying off people to turn in videos, giving away all those prizes and providing the video equipment at the harbor.
"That's incentivizing," he said. "I don't think that's as effective as having visitors who say, 'This is what I've seen and I love it and you should come here if you like zoos or Inner Harbors or seafood.'"
Though the campaign largely depends on people taking the time to make videos - and those videos being half-decent - BACVA says it is not worried.
"What if we don't get videos? We'll get videos," said Nancy Hinds, the organization's spokeswoman. "We'd like to get a ton."
Over the past few months, BACVA has been testing the Visit MyBaltimore site, asking attractions around town to submit videos and creating a MySpace page dedicated to the project.
Yesterday, however, only one video of the handful posted on the site looked as if it was made by a "real" person, rather than the Baltimore Zoo or the city's Museum of Industry or the Harbor Magic hotel group.
The video was done by a young woman with heavy eye makeup and lower-lip piercing who calls herself Claire. Her delivery is entirely smile-free, from the opening at the Chesapeake House rest stop through a jaunt on the harbor's dragon boats through a peek at the top of the World Trade Center. She lights up only when she points out the cotton candy she bought.
"The day wouldn't be perfect until I got my cotton candy, and I did. I loooooove my cotton candy," she says flirtatiously.
jill.rosen@baltsun.com